Drew

Social Media Smackdown:

Idea 1: __10th grade gemara - social tension news blog__ Using blogger or something comprable

Create a rotation of students, so each week a student or pair of students are responsible for posting a link to a news story which reflects the social tension of the particular gemara we're working on that week, with an explanation of how they see the tension in the gemara reflected in the news story. Other students will be expected to post comments, and the student(s) responsible for posting the story each week will also be responsible for monitoring the comments of their classmates and leading a discussion at the end of the week.

Idea 2: Use Vics Picks for mapping sugyot of gemara []

Students will create visual organizers for each sugya, using forms of their choice, and then compare their maps with other students, both looking at the map itself, as well as thinking about how each visual style is appropriate or not for the ideas that they are representing - discussing the strengths and weaknesses of presenting information in different visual ways, as well as mapping out the logic of the gemara itself. Would be ongoing throughout the year.

Idea number three:

I'm teaching an elective next year on violence and non-violence in Judaism. Assuming we make it to the present, I could have the students connect, via twitter/facebook/skype/however with people here - either with the IDF spokeperson on twitter, or someone like Joseph Dana or Sami Awad who are ideologically engaged in non-violence.

Op-ed: Tanakh and gemara present us with multiple ways of organizing a society - we learn about the various societal institutions, and about the assumptions behind those societal institutions. As we learn, especially with the gemara and those commenting on it, we can see the way those institutions deal with different values present in their societies. I am not interested in teaching these texts simply so my students can learn how societies were once organized, but rather to give them the tools to think critically about how we organize our society, and how different values are played out via current societal institutions. The videos below are examples of this kind of endeavor - asking questions such as, “How does facebook reward us for disclosure?” or “What are the assumptions behind and biases of the current monetary system?” I believe we have a responsibility to educate our students to ask those kinds of questions, and I believe the gemara to be an excellent tool to do so. What kinds of questions do the Rabbis ask? Why do we think they ask those questions?

I recognize that the technological and legal systems which function today are a far cry from the simpler, and perhaps more comprehensible, systems of ancient Israel and the Rabbinic project. The fundamental question, however, is the same - how does G?d (according to our own understandings) want us to set up our society? How does justice function? How do we read our texts in their proper historical context so as to understand the advances in human knowledge and morality that have occurred since the ancient near east? How can we use the tools of logic in our tradition to understand our own context, and change it for the better?

re: facebook, kids and privacy media type="youtube" key="RAGjNe1YhMA" height="349" width="560"

some Rushkoff, first on the lighter side: media type="youtube" key="JFVz6TXSN0U" height="349" width="560"

and a touch more serious: media type="youtube" key="dMDt4jiNCUI" height="349" width="425"